SC4 Wiki - General Discussion

[dedgren]

This is a thread where general discussion about the community's Wiki [linkie] can take place.  The Wiki staff is also welcome to post announcements here.


David

[RadicalOne]

The SC4 Wiki appears to be a work in progress...many pages are half-done, or even just recently started. I notice this is common on devoted wikis. Still, it can be a useful source of information.

Yes, I'm aware of the large bump here.

[simmaster07]

The SC4 Wiki appears to be a work in progress...many pages are half-done, or even just recently started. I notice this is common on devoted wikis. Still, it can be a useful source of information.

Yes, I'm aware of the large bump here.

EDIT: Large bumps such as this are generally frowned upon here. Thanks! - Dustin (thundercrack83)

Well there are a limited number of wiki editors versus the total amount of members. All members used to be able to edit the wiki, but that capability was disabled by the staff after an edit war.

[RadicalOne]

EDIT: Large bumps such as this are generally frowned upon here. Thanks! - Dustin (thundercrack83)

Acknowledged.

[rooker1]

 At this time we are only allowing trusted members to be able to edit the SC4 Wiki.  Alot of hard work and dedication has been put into it.  The decision was made to lock it up after a certain person basically defaced many pages of the SC4 Wiki causing alot effort and time to correct it all. 

If you would like the right to edit the SC4 Wiki, please send a PM to a Moderator or an Admin and you will be considered.

Robin

[simmaster07]

Going a little off topic, improperly formatted template here.

Code Select Expand

{{pictify}}
should be

Code Select Expand

{{pictify|fansite=fansite name}}
For example

Code Select Expand

{{pictify|fansite=SC4Devotion}}

[Patricius Maximus]

Well, I think the reason for inactivity is the (semi-)closed nature of the wiki. Such controlled user-generated sites do not generate as much content as one that is more open. Take the difference between the SC4D wiki and, say, wikipedia, or  better yet for similarity, the wiki of the AFDES alliance. Difference in procedure is marked, and that naturally produces different outcomes. If this is what the staff wants I'm okay with it, it's their wiki.

If you would like the right to edit the SC4 Wiki, please send a PM to a Moderator or an Admin and you will be considered.

Yes, I did send a message to dedgren requesting the right many months ago. I never received any response, and did not obtain editorship. I don't know if this is standard procedure or what, but it somewhat puzzled me.

[Diggis]

Yes, I did send a message to dedgren requesting the right many months ago. I never received any response, and did not obtain editorship. I don't know if this is standard procedure or what, but it somewhat puzzled me.

David gets tons of PM's a day so this may have slipped through, I'm checking on this for you, will get back to you on it soon.

[Patricius Maximus]

So it may be the classic "slipping through the cracks" problem? I shall be awaiting the "check" on that hypothesis.

[Haljackey]

_{Clears the tumbleweed}

I went to the SC4 Wiki today and it seems that there still members adding to articles and keeping others updated.

So I was wondering, how do we promote the SC4 Wiki? I know there's an icon on the home page but I think we can do more throughout the SC4 community.

Also how do you apply to become a 'Zecondary Group: Wiki Staff' member? I think I have editor status but didn't know anything about this status until today.

[Tarkus]

Currently, the way the Wiki is being handled, I've been manually registering accounts for members with significantly advanced technical information about the game who have asked for editorship, and that's where the bulk of the recent activity has come. 

I have brought the Wiki up for further discussion among the upper staff, as of a few minutes ago.

As far as the "Zecondary Group: Wiki Staff", that's currently a membergroup for those who have Moderator positions on the Wiki, allowing access to the Wiki Private Board.

-Alex

[memo]

I really appreciate the way all the current knowledge about the game has been gathered and is offered publicly accessible nowadays, both in the tutorial section here at SC4D and at the Wiki. When I started transit modding, for instance, I had to look forever through the forums at Simtropolis to find a link to redlotus' interchange tutorial, which was broken unfortunately, and then had to search for another link. Luckily, I have found the tutorial, but I can tell I was close to giving up before even having started. I also had to look for the building-mill-script, which I eventually found as an attachment. Of course, I was not aware of the fact I would never need it actually and ended up exporting plane rectangles out of GMAX. It is no wonder that there was nearly nobody knowing how to mod transit items. In addition, it has always been praised as being too difficult. Man, reflecting on this makes me feel, we should really have more appreciation for the early NAMites' work which we tend to take for granted. Have you ever imagined the disaster, if we had not been able to create effect directory files? Effect directories would have been way above my abilities, for sure.

Having said that, the one thing I would like to say regarding the Wiki is that it is sometimes quite confusing that there are multiple pages dealing with the same subject. For example, there is the page on the RUL1 file which is requested to be reviewed; while there is the page on the IntersectionSolutions RUL copied from Tropod's network specs. Although both pages are linked to each other, these information should really be joined on one page. The same goes for all the other transit related pages as the other RUL files, the Network INI, path files... Especially the paths: There is not even a link from the "Network Specs/Paths"-page to the "SC4Path"-page. Again, these information would be better off merged in one single page.

[NCGAIO]

So I was wondering, how do we promote the SC4 Wiki?

Certainly the fact of maintaining control over the editing flees a little of the spirit of a Wiki but if ever there was a previous abuse I think is justified.

I'd hate to see spoiled all the excellent work done to attach the content of "Wiki ModTheSims2" that was done by technicians community members active  after they became aware of this in January.- Link

Maybe if access were more widespread this knowledge could encourage new creators to dedicate their time and bring some news.

Maybe these data were to be directly related to a link in the main menu categories and not in a subtitle in categories wiki  like MTS2  that really does not seem to indicate what it is really!


Unless it is to be like that, of course ....

[whatevermind]

Just a quick note, since this has suddenly come alive.  I have planned some bit of a news release to just generally let the community know about the work I've been doing on the technical articles - mainly so they stop using old info from the old wiki - whenever I finish that up.  Now that this thread is alive again, I might pare down the notice a bit, but nonetheless, some announcements are in the works as that project wraps up.

memo - those pages are next on my list, and I'm hoping maybe this weekend or next to get the various network-related pages cleaned up.

On that note, those of you working on technical articles - I often make the larger edits offline and upload them to the Wiki in more or less complete form - so if a technical (especially file format related) page looks like I haven't yet gone over it (or have, but for something trivial, i.e. typos or categories) - then there may be bigger changes I've made offline and just haven't had the time to upload yet.  Wouldn't hurt to shoot me a PM just to make sure so we can coordinate and don't end up making more work for each other.  At this point, this really only applies to the network-related file types and a handful of mostly organizational and rather trivial pages.

I had seen and wondered about that Wiki staff badge too, it's a rare one for sure, good to know what it's for.

OK, gotta run! 

[memo]

whatevermind, I am glad to hear about the fact there is still progress at the wiki, which I appreciate a lot. You do not need to worry about any conflicting edits by me though.

[whatevermind]

There was a post by NCGAIO here that raised a few questions and reminded me of others regarding categories on the Wiki.  This is my response to that post (here to keep the other thread on topic).

First, the MTS2 category is, as that category page explains, merely to keep track of those pages, specifically for anyone who is trying to find these documents for whatever reason.  It is not meant to be the way the average user finds these pages (though it does work for that too).

Every page tagged with that category should also have a second category that is meant for organizational purposes, such as Modding, File Formats/xxx, Savegame/subfiles, etc. These in turn have parent categories as needed, eventually reaching the main parent category of Customizing the Game.  In theory, someone who landed on the Main Page looking for articles about customizing the game, would find that category and then be able to work their way to the pages they needed.  You can also use the search feature to do the same.  This brings up something I noticed, but forgot about, which is that when I created the Customizing the Game category, I didn't put a link to it on the main page because that page is protected for admins only.  So, Wiki Admins, could you please add a link to the main page that looks like so:



Linking to that category. Please and thank you. 

Sometime earlier this year, I overhauled the categories on the Wiki to try to untangle what had grown into a rather convoluted mess of links and categories. In the process I created some categories, moved others, and deprecated a few as well, into something that seemed to make more sense.  That page details the various primary categories, and the purpose of each after untangling them from each other as much as possible. Actually, now that I think about it, the Playing the Game category isn't linked to the main page either, so perhaps an Admin could add that as well, per the image above.

My goal was to restore some order to a site that had grown a bit messy from it's original setup to now. However, like any site, it is constantly changing, and there may be a way to organize things that makes more sense to more people, and certainly that should be discussed.  There are also parts in progress at any given time, and part of that is to make sure they are properly integrated into the structure of the site, which is something we try to ensure.  On that note, if there are pages that seem to have fallen out of the category structure, or thoughts about the category structure itself, this would be an excellent place to start that discussion. 

[NCGAIO]

My apologies for posting off topic on this subject but as the post was an administrator, I found relevant since they can only make changes to the main page.


My intention was just to highlight the fact that the material not be so easy on the main page thus creating the same difficulty I had to see him on the SImsWiki.


Regarding the organization of pages is certainly an issue that should be better assessed by their usual collaborators. But as I said in the  other post I think that make information to modding more available facilitates the work of those interested in creating. At least that's what I thought when I posted the links here  to Simswiki in January

[CasperVg]

<snip>

Every page tagged with that category should also have a second category that is meant for organizational purposes, such as Modding, File Formats/xxx, Savegame/subfiles, etc. These in turn have parent categories as needed, eventually reaching the main parent category of Customizing the Game.  In theory, someone who landed on the Main Page looking for articles about customizing the game, would find that category and then be able to work their way to the pages they needed.  You can also use the search feature to do the same.  This brings up something I noticed, but forgot about, which is that when I created the Customizing the Game category, I didn't put a link to it on the main page because that page is protected for admins only.  So, Wiki Admins, could you please add a link to the main page that looks like so:

<image>

Linking to that category. Please and thank you. 

<snip>

I added that category to the header, great idea!

[whatevermind]

I was poking around the Savegames articles today, getting a first good look at the newer specs (thanks CasperVG and jdenm8 by the way), and had a few thoughts on some ways to maybe organize that whole section to cut down some of the redundancy.

It seems that a lot of the info in the "Appendices" is repeated across several pages. I'm thinking especially SGProps should be it's own page and linked to from all the pages that use that. Some of the others such as Appearance Flags could also be offloaded to their own articles.

From a format spec clarity standpoint, a lot of these files consist of headers and repeating chunks of data. When this happens in other file types, we usually spec the header format, and then define whatever part repeats, and spec that format, etc. Somebody should go through these files and better define just what exactly is the repeating chunk (i.e. for each building, prop, flora, lot, etc.).

Anyway, just some thoughts in case you guys are still working on these. Otherwise it's something I might get to down the road.

[memo]

I noticed the other day that there is some misleading/wrong info in the article Network INI.

Continue is always implied to be 1 unless otherwise specified.

If one of the Wiki moderators could replace the above sentence by the following section, please, that would be perfect.

Continue is always implied to be 0 unless otherwise specified. If 1, the new-ID is used as match-ID in subsequent entries. This can be iterated. If 0, the new-ID is returned, no matter if it matches subsequent entries.

Hence, continue turns out to be a very powerful feature.